Moving on

There was great excitement at today's meeting of the Recreation committee of Egglescliffe & Eaglescliffe council. The meeting was held at Stirling House in Thornaby, home of the Stockton council officers who deal with parks and green spaces. Today was the day that the tenders for work on St Margaret's play area were to be discussed. Out of 11 initial expressions of interest 6 designs had been submitted. We had the job, working with council officers, of deciding on which ones should go through to the next stage of consulting with the young people of the area. Already the school council of the Links primary have had a look this afternoon and chose their favourite after much discussion. We looked, tried to imagine what a 5 year old would feel and what a 15 year old would feel when faced with the different designs; tried to imagine a child going there for 10 minutes on the way home from school and going for an hour or two on a Saturday afternoon. Was there enough play value, enough scope for imagination to run riot? Was there enough to keep the older ones amused so that they didn't feel the need to play over-vigorously on the smaller equipment? How much maintenance would the surface need? Would the equipment survive the winter?
At last there were 3 designs which seemed to fulfil most of the requirements we had. Ideally we'd like to take the best of all of them but as they come from different suppliers as well as different designers that won't be possible so now it's down to the children of the area to come up with their favourites. The officers are trying really hard to get into al the schools in the area as well as the youth club to see what the young people say. On 7th January they'll bring the results of those consultations to the Parish Council and a final decision will be made so that the order can be put in.
Meanwhile petition signatures continue to pour in, mainly from Eaglescliffe but also from other parts of Stockton including Ingleby Barwick. I do wonder whether there's as much support over there for the idea as is being suggested. Perhaps people over the other side of the river can see that in the current economic climate a bridge is unlikely to be built so children would still have to be bussed off the estate and they'd have lost a park which is visited by many of them.

A Little Bit of Good News

This morning I was again at our new Outdoor shop in Portrack, this time to exchange something bought by someone else earlier in the week. Putting the exchange through the till was a procedure for which the member of staff on the till hadn't yet been trained so took longer than it might have done and provided an opportunity for conversation with her and a more experienced member of staff who came along to help her when she got stuck. It turned out that they were both unemployed when the store had advertised for staff - one from Woolwoths and one from a non-retail job. They were both enormously pleased to have their jobs, were enjoying the work and were very happy that Go Outdoors had opened. The ex-Woolworths employee was an excellent teacher and took the opportunity of relaxed customers and a relatively quiet midweek morning to make the transaction a proper and enjoyable learning experience for the older lady. Now that's what I call regeneration - never mind the buildings, think about the people.
At this evening's Parish council meeting the news about the successful bid for Playbuilder funding for St Margaret's Play area was announced and at last I was released from my promise of secrecy made a fortnight ago. The Recreation committee will meet after Easter with officers of Stockton Borough Council and plan the way ahead for the project. Great news after a year of delays and disappointments.
Unfortunately, though not entirely unexpectedly, Amberley Way wasn't considered to be within the criteria for Play Builder funding so we need to look at what we can do there with the funding we have available. Probably quite a bit, but over a longer time frame and without the input of experts on the site plans.